Gerald Ridsdale
Australian laicised Catholic priest and sex offender (1934–2025)
Gerald Francis Ridsdale (20 May 1934 – 18 February 2025) was an Australian laicised Catholic priest and prolific sex offender.
He was convicted between 1993 and 2017 of a large number of child sexual abuse and indecent assault charges against 65 children aged as young as four years. The majority of the offences occurred from the 1960s to the 1980s while Ridsdale worked as a school chaplain at St Alipius Primary School, a boys' boarding school in the Victorian regional city of Ballarat.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that senior figures in the church, including Cardinal George Pell, knew about Ridsdale's prolific sexual abuse of children but protected him. Ridsdale was ordained at St Patrick's Cathedral, Ballarat, in 1961. The first complaint about his behaviour towards children was received by the church that same year. Ridsdale held 16 different appointments over a period of 29 years as a priest, with an average of 1.8 years per appointment.
Career and allegations of offences
Ridsdale was born at St Arnaud in central Victoria and grew up in Ballarat. It was alleged in 2013 that Ridsdale sexually abused boys as early as 1955, when he was aged 21. He attended school at St Patrick’s College, and in 2016 he had his name blacked out from an honour board which honoured former students who took holy orders.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gerald Ridsdale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.